Michael Bunker - Dunes over Danvar

Women divers though, that was another thing altogether. There weren’t many, but the ones he’d met were better than any man. Male divers thought with their sex and treated diving like it was a competition. A woman diver did her work, made her coin, and didn’t treat it like a game. She’d live longer than any boy. That’s why the mortality rate was so high among boys who ventured under the dunes. Near on a hundred percent, he figured, if you stretch out the timeline long enough.

He’d had a woman of his own once. Petra was her name. He’d even called her wife . But that was long ago, back when he was passionate and dumb. Maybe he even loved her. Maybe he still did. Hard to say. Can’t spend love , he always said. He’d take her back if she weren’t long dead from the cough. The sand got her, too, in the end, because she was stupid and refused to wear a ker out in the dunes. Rebellious, she was, and thought she’d live forever. Cough got her just like it did anyone who thought the sand cared enough to spare you. The sand don’t care, not one whit. That was the main thing.

The Poet had seen men die in ways he’d never thought possible back when he was a boy spending his days running errands and polishing his daddy’s sarfer. Back when he was learning the ways of the sand. He released the rope he was holding for a second and knocked the matte from his hair. Some of it fell down into the top of his ker, working its way into the corners of his mouth and beard, but the rest went back home to join the swells of particulate that—as far as he knew—covered the whole earth but for the distant mountaintops out west.

Topping a dune up ahead of him, Bolger shouted, and as the Poet came up behind him he saw him pointing toward a disruption on the horizon. Maybe an oasis, or maybe a copse of treetops jutting up from the sand. Likely to be water either way. His man kept on his draft and the convoy headed for the feature on the horizon. Sun was up full now and hot. Water would be necessary if Bolger planned to push them farther north.

At first only the oranges filled Peary’s visor, but as he stretched and pushed downward he could see the farther-off purples and tinges of blue and aqua. He kicked against what he’d hardened behind himself and felt the looser sand that flowed around his visor and chest give way to his motion. He was dragging the two spare tanks, but going down he didn’t feel them.

The aqua color down there—down at the fringes of his vision, now giving way to darker purple—reminded him of Marisa, and the polished rocks, turquoise and green, she’d bought from a trader once with precious coin. He loved her for that, too, even if he didn’t get it and thought it was wasteful. There was no sorting it. A woman loved what she loved, and who could figure it?

As he descended, the cool came, and he felt it through his suit, and welcomed it. He sipped on his tank and stretched for the deep. He’d forgotten to count, which was more of a habit than a rule, but his visor showed him at fifty meters and he was just starting to feel the press in his chest. Not tight yet, but firm and good. He liked the feel of fifty to a hundred, and maybe another twenty or thirty after that, but then the real pushback came, and he didn’t like that so much.

The air from his tanks was nice and sweet, but he had a tiny stream of gunk making its way into his goggles. Nothing tragic, but not ideal. He concentrated on moving the sand and flowing it smoothly around himself. No blips on his visor yet. He didn’t expect to see the sandscrapers of Danvar yet—those were said to be a mile down, and even if they were half that he wouldn’t see them on this dive—but depth and distance were odd out in the shifting dunes. He’d often found salvage at less than one fifty, and had hit hard ground at less than two hundred before. And this time he was going deeper.

At one hundred and fifty he felt the press and he dropped his first tank. He watched it disappear behind him, glowing bright red in his visor with orange at the edges. With his twin tanks, he was good down past two hundred meters and could still make it back without a spare. If he was careful with his breathing, two fifty was doable. Beyond that and he’d have to rely on the spares—and he’d be well past his deep.

Peary stretched out and tried to slow his breathing even more, felt his muscles strain, and his mind too. He tried to keep himself going straight vertical, and focused on keeping the sand closest to his upper body as loose as possible. The pushback was strong; he could feel the tightness around his neck, and his lungs had to work to push outward with each breath. And to think that people—mere human divers—had gone down half a mile or more? Or so the rumors went.

Then he could see it. Not through his visor, but in his mind’s eye. His own body trapped in the sand. He immediately pushed that thought away, because that was the thought that would kill you. He’d almost coffined like that before, at a much shallower depth. A lapse like that and everything around him would turn hard as stonesand and his next breath would never come. Even with the tank and whatever precious oxygen remained in it, his lungs would never expand again, because the sand would crush in on him and thwart his inhale. So he put his thoughts on Marisa, and he pictured himself telling her he loved her and how much he appreciated her.

Past two hundred meters. The death zone. Hard to tell now because the reading in his visor was starting to fade. Losing all contact with the surface. He stopped and looked around, concentrated on keeping the sand soft around himself. He looked down, and when he calmed himself, he saw the first dot of orange, and then red, and it surprised him. As if this whole dive had been an exercise and he’d never really hoped to find anything. He moved again. The dot grew until he knew he was looking at a something . Angular. Solid and manmade. Straight lines heading down and away from a point that was changing from orange to red and then a deeper red. The lines moving away disappeared into greens and shades of blue.

He pushed down, the sand behind him becoming harder than stone, the pushback growing with each meter. And then the yellow appeared. Two forms, clinging to the red structure with orange where the two colors met. And he knew what they were, the two shapes in yellow.

They were men. Divers just like him.

And they were dead.

Two of Bolger’s divers were down under the sand. Down there with large jars and water skins, searching for the underground spring or river that once wetted the trees whose tops now served as leaning posts for the rest of the crew. Everyone just waited in the sun and drained their own canteens so that they would be empty and prepared for more. Water was the other truth of the world, water and sand. Only, a man could live without sand.

The Poet licked his lips, even though he knew better. Waste of water, and it made them dry out faster. His daddy used to smack him when he licked his lips out in the dunes under the relentless sun. He would say, “Go on and cut your wrists, boy, it’ll be faster!”

The sand near where the divers had disappeared didn’t stir, and all the men were watching, waiting for one of the divers to break the surface, to hold up those precious containers of liquid life. Someone told an awful joke, and everyone laughed, even the other divers, even though the joke was about how divers dying down there was just something to be expected.

That’s when the first man died. He was in mid-laugh when it happened. He was a diver too, laughing about divers dying, and a spear went through his throat and pinned him to the gnarly gray-black treetop that arrogantly dared poke its way up through the sand.